Technology

60 employees who can’t be productive without AI?

And this is progress?

Oh no! How did this happen? ...I mean, how exactly did this happen? Is there a tutorial on how other engineers at other companies can replicate this?

Just another form of vendor lock-in. If your business model is mostly/entirely dependent on an external party, that should be a well understood risk.

That's what happens when you are renting your very skills from a company. You'll hone nothing and you'll be happy.

Aaaaaand example #99999... Of why tech sovereignty is so important. The moment you start outsourcing your control, you become vulnerable to this exact kind of action by a company.

Everybody got sucked into the cloud "magic" for years, but now we are seeing the monster emerge more and more as proprietary technology enshitifies.

Luckily, there is a boom happening across the FOSS world, more and more people are finally waking up to the principles of software freedom and actual ownership.

May it continue to grow, as the corpos struggle and wither.

Or... taps mic... don't fucking rely on AI for your business! Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Many commenters were quick to point out that he should never have coupled his company so closely with Claude to begin with, a reasonable critique by itself. However, it's worth noting that the story could have easily been the same if it had instead been Amazon Web Services, Azure, or an authentication provider like Okta.

You are so close, you almost got it!

This is the nightmare scenario for any team that built their whole workflow around a cloud API. No warning, no clear reason, no real support path. just a Google form and 60 people sitting on their hands.

The uncomfortable truth is that "terms of service" at this scale is just "we can pull the rug whenever." Anthropic isn't unique here either. OpenAI, Google, all of them have the same opaque enforcement problem. It's a big part of why I've been building tools that run on local inference by default. Not because cloud is bad, but because your users shouldn't be one vague policy complaint away from a complete outage.

Local gives you continuity even when the upstream disappears.

This is true for any company using 3rd party services. I worked for one that used a 3rd party messaging service to send out mfa texts to users. The company was hacked and went offline, so we couldnt send any mfa codes.... and of course, they had no plan b.

In business, always have a backup

60 employees were dead in the water, as reportedly their daily workflows rely on the AI assistant's

Is that a joke? 60 employees do not know how to do their job? This is not Anthropic's problem.

Just continue coding using the natural neural networks in the brains of those 60 employees until the problem has been resolved and/or another AI provider selected. It's not like Claude invented coding. Sure, it's a pretty useful tool. But it is possible to research obscure APIs and develop software manually.

Either they didn't pay, they found an exploit, or, more likely, someone at Claude was reviewing their conversations. Take note, any business that cares about IP or confidentiality.

Ironically, this is a great case study to illustrate the value of Chinese models. They've released a number that are on par with Claude's latest models under "open weight" licenses that would allow you to run them yourselves if you wanted to, or to hire some other third party to provide API access. It wouldn't matter what the original company's "usage policy" is in that case.

There are a couple of Western open models that aren't bad either, but they tend to be aimed at a smaller and simpler use case than Claude.

https://bannedbyanthropic.com/

I believe the word is capricious. Everything cloud based is at the whim of someone else.

There are ways to mitigate against that, but ultimately if it's not yours...it's not yours.

You're going to see a lot more of this and other forms of fuckery as the VC money dries up.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/four-horsemen-of-the-aipocalypse/

Now this company can see which employee can actually still program, and which is just a "AI Prompt Engineer".

Oh my God, my Eliza 2.0 chatbot is blocked. I'm experiencing withdrawals already, my productivity is down 76.8%.

Fucking hilarious that the "best" chatbot can't even manage a decent support chatbot...

That's one way to save costs.